He is cold. It's always cold around this time of year. The sun decides it's had enough and pops off for a quick solstice nap. Not that he minds. He's used to the cold by now. He props his collar up, puffs his scarf to cover all exposed skin; all that dead, gray skin. He tucks his gloves down over the wrists and sucks on the butt of his last cigarette. Damn things never last. His wife used to say it'd give him cancer, not that it matters now. He lowers his woolen packer hat over his brow and stares at his reflection in a shopfront window. He used to recognize himself, now what is he? It had all happened so fast; the heart attack; cracking his head on the tile floor; the ethereal sensation that he was losing life, as though it were seeping out of a hole somewhere. And then the doctors. The nurses. The scalpel. He saw it all, from outside his body. He watched as they operated, trying so heroically to save his life, but in the end the line went dead. So what the hell is he doing back on Winthrop street in high Winter, and how did he return? ---- The door to the shop swung open and closed to a chime of bells. Instinctively, the man flicked his cigarette to the ground and stamped it out. He turned from the window to face a young woman. “Hello, John,” she called. John stared at her awhile. He had lived in this town for most of his life and frequented Winthrop Street, but he did not know this woman. “I didn’t think you’d recognize me,” she continued, beckoning him to join her. John stumbled forward, his legs stiff and robotic. With each painful step he took, he stared at the red-haired woman before him. She gazed at him with warm eyes and her thin lips formed a half-smile. When at last he reached her, she took his hand and led him off Winthrop onto Northup Lane. They walked silently past farmlands with overgrown pastures but no horses there to graze; past a lake where a fisher had cast his nets but no fish there to be caught. They ascended a hill and reached a wooden bench overlooking those vast, empty acres. “Why did you lead me back here?” John ventured. The woman dropped his hand. “This,” she cautioned, “is your last chance.” (First two hundred words by Shane Vaughan. Posted for http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2013/11/29/flash-fiction-challenge-200-words-at-a-time-part-two/.)

On the fourth of July James set forth a decree: No more iambs or spondees or pyrrhics for me. Listen closely now, folks, as I rhapsodize plight: We are losing our poetry – our God-given right! Now the prose writers live in a poor state of rhyme, and despite my intentions they’re all out of time. Their archaic tradition makes poems sound old, and they crumble and crack like some dinosaur bones, for their verses are fossils – they’re pterodactyllic, not to mention their imagery’s far from idyllic. So now gather, all lyricists. Sound their defeat! It is time that our country stood strong on its feet – on its rhythms and patterns of metrical beat!(Original poem written for a creative writing course at Penn State. January 2013.)

On a blustery winter’s night the Earth was invaded by space aliens. No one knew how or why they arrived, but they wasted no time rolling their gargantuan amorphous bodies over towns and buildings and humans. People far enough away watched with hands on hips, curious about who exactly had come. Some postulated the cosmic amoebas had flown from a neighboring galaxy, but physicists debunked that theory. Space, they claimed, was uninhabitable, and no living being could survive a light-years’-long journey. A new theory formed: God commanded these creatures to ascend from hell as punishment for mankind. And so, while Christians and Muslims and everyone argued over whose version of hell they ascended from and whose God was punishing them, our formless foes easily engulfed entire continents. One man sought to rescue his planet. Having dealt with aliens before this invasion, he was uninterested in the religious arguments bandied about. “No one can solve a problem by talking about the problem,” Woodstock Helmes was famous for saying, and it was with this sentiment that he turned to address a small team of rag-tag volunteers as pseudopod bodies blocked sunlight and the walls of his village began crumbling down.(Written for a flash fiction collaboration: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2013/11/22/flash-fiction-challenge-200-words-at-a-time-part-one/)